'Meta, YouTube and TikTok engaged in vast surveillance', says FTC

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in their study, has claimed that nine companies, including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok, engaged in extensive surveillance of consumers, including minors, collecting and sharing more personal information than most users realised.

The report states that the sites, which mostly offer free services, profited from the data by using it for advertising that targets specific users based on demographics. The companies also failed to adequately protect users, especially children and teenagers.

The FTC said it began its study nearly four years ago to provide the first comprehensive look into the opaque business practices of some of the biggest online platforms that have built multibillion-dollar advertising businesses using consumer data. “Surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identity theft to stalking,” said Lina Kahn, the FTC’s chair, in a statement.

Efforts by the companies to regulate themselves have also failed, the FTC concluded in its report. “Self-regulation has been a failure,” it added.

According to a New York Times report, Google, which owns YouTube, stated, “We have the strictest privacy policy in our industry. We never sell people’s personal information, and we don’t use sensitive information to serve ads,” said José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google. He added, “We prohibit ad personalisation for users under 18, and we don’t personalise ads to anyone watching ‘made for kid content’ on YouTube.”

In December 2020, the agency opened its inquiry into the nine companies that operate 13 platforms. The FTC requested data from each company for operations between 2019 and 2020 and then studied how the companies had collected, used, and retained that data.

The FTC found that the companies voraciously consumed data about users and often purchased information about people who weren’t users through data brokers. They also gathered information from accounts linked to other services.

Most of the companies collected users' age, gender, and the language they spoke. Many platforms also obtained information on education, income, and marital status. The companies didn’t provide users with easy ways to opt out of data collection and often retained sensitive information for much longer than consumers would expect, the agency said.

The companies used data to create profiles of users, often merging the information they gathered with details about habits collected on other sites, to serve targeted advertisements.

The agency also found that many sites claimed they restricted access to users under the age of 13, yet many children remained on the platforms. Teenagers were also treated like adults on many of the apps, subjecting them to the same data collection as adults. Many of the companies couldn’t tell the FTC how much data they were collecting, according to the study.